Martian Knightlife Read online

  "But it doesn't make any sense," Sarda protested. "All the tests show I'm indistinguishable by any measure anyone can come up with. So if the original had worked out some kind of plan like this before he went in, I ought to know about it. But I don't. So how could it be him?"

  "That's what we have to find out," Kieran replied.

  Sarda looked at him uncertainly. "Does that mean you'll help?" he asked.

  Kieran was too curious to walk away now. The Sarda he was talking to came across as personable enough, even if just at the moment probably not exactly at his most composed ever; the Sarda who had fleeced him had to be a very different person. Yet they were supposed to be indistinguishable. "I suppose I'd like to know the answers too," he said.

  "Don't you usually expect to get paid for something like this?" Sarda asked.

  "There's nothing usual about it, Leo, I assure you."

  "You know what I mean, Mr. Thane."

  "Would it be worth something to you?"

  Sarda frowned, then showed both hands in a gesture that asked what other way was there to answer. "Well, if you recover five million for me, I guess yes, that would have to be worth something."

  "Then let's talk about it when it's recovered," Kieran suggested.

  8

  The center panel of the mural design on June's living-area wall was switched to viewscreen mode and showed a replay of people waiting in front of the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab at Quantonix. A frizzy-haired figure in a gray lab smock, whom Kieran had met during his visit there and recognized as Stewart Perrel, chief physician on the TX Project, swung open the access door and leaned inside. A moment later he turned to call back over his shoulder, "He's okay! It worked fine! Leo's okay!" Relieved murmurs came from the company. Then Sarda, draped in a surgical smock, was helped out to a chorus of congratulations and applause.

  "So Sarda was brought out from Earth about a year ago to run the project," Kieran said, keeping his eyes on the screen and selecting parts to zoom into close-up. It was mid afternoon, the same day. Kieran had called June, saying they had a problem, and asked her to meet him back at the apartment. He didn't really expect to see anything new since they had rerun the recording several times, but there was always the chance. "Was it a typical sunsider deal?"

  June nodded from where she was curled up at an end of the eggshell-blue couch with Teddy stretched out alongside in that attitude of perfect laziness and contentment that only cats and teenagers, before being smitten by culturally instructed adulation of avarice, can achieve. A precarious truce had been reached with regard to Guinness, who just at the moment had been taken for a romp along the lakeshore by some children from the neighboring terraces. "He'd been trying to get something going there, but the problems would have tied up city blocks of lawyers for the next hundred years," she said. "He came out on an exclusive retainer. Five million on top of what he'd have collected in a year, in the bank before any deal with a principal was finalized, wasn't a bad offer." Kieran nodded. As the technical brains of the business, Sarda would also have been cut into a share of the proceeds later, when the proven technology was sold. With the sunsider not getting involved in the hassles of producing and marketing the actual goods, everything beyond paying off the costs of the research would be pure profit. That was where the real payoff lay.

  Kieran cut off the replay and swivelled the recliner to face June across the room. "If it wasn't Sarda-the-First that the bell tolled for at midnight, then it must have been something else that was substituted. A client from a morgue somewhere, perhaps, who was past caring where it all led?"

  "That's what I was wondering," June said. "But surely a body in suspension like that would be monitored. Wouldn't substituting a corpse set off all kinds of alarms?"

  "Not necessarily. The sensors would feed into a monitoring computer. All you'd need to do would be to change the software to make it carry on reporting normal readings, whatever the sensors were registering."

  June conceded with a nod. "Of course. Okay . . ."

  Kieran went on, "Someone else must have done the switching. So we have an accomplice. It has to be someone with the medical background to do the body switching and take care of resuscitating the original; also enough computer savvy to reprogram the monitoring system without setting off bells." He stared at June invitingly to make the connection.

  "Ah! Is this where the missing mystery woman enters: Elaine, the tall and slim, of the curly black hair?"

  "Maybe. But the funny thing is, Sarda-Two doesn't know anything about any such arrangement with anybody. Yet he's supposed to have the same memories as the Sarda who would have made them. They're supposed to be the same person."

  June frowned. "What was that man's name at the restaurant, again?"

  "Walter—of the Trevany kind."

  "Walter Trevany. That was it."

  "How did that incident strike you?" Kieran asked curiously.

  "Eerie," June pronounced. "He hadn't made a mistake. As he said at the time, Sarda's hardly the faceless kind of person that you forget easily."

  "And he knew Leo's name."

  "So was Sarda lying for some reason?" June shook her head. "I don't think so. He came across to me as genuine enough."

  "Me too," Kieran said. "And when I talked to him today, he admitted to having rising fears about the whole thing as D-Day came nearer, but he couldn't recall voicing them to anyone. I thought that was odd too. He seems the type who would have." He made a plucking motion in the air to materialize a coin between thumb and forefinger, tossed it toward his other hand which apparently caught it, and showed both hands empty again. Then he looked back at June challengingly to make what she could of it.

  She went over what they had covered as if reciting a checklist. "No recollection of the woman that Trevany saw him with in the bar. Must have had an accomplice but doesn't know anything about it. You'd have thought there'd be somebody he confided in, but he can't recall anyone." Her look said the question was obvious, wasn't it? "Are we talking about the same person here?"

  Kieran opened his palms to reveal not one coin but two. "You tell me."

  "Girlfriend, accomplice, and confidante," June mused.

  "And he doesn't remember any of them."

  The dark, impenetrable eyes held Kieran's searchingly. "Is there a pattern here, Sir Knight? I see a strong suggestion of selective amnesia at work. Is that the way your mind's working too?"

  "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? Let's try and put ourselves in his position. However successful the animal tests appeared, he can't get inside their heads and know how it might have affected them in other ways. He's the one who's taking all the risks. And all he's standing to get out of it in return is the prospect of going down in history as Plasma Man. It's Sarda Mark Two who's going to get all the accolades, walk out to a cool five million, and probably end up a billionaire later. How would you feel about it?"

  "About the same as you. But he argued pretty solidly for this rationale that he pitched at us about only speeding up what happens naturally," June pointed out.

  "Too much so, if you ask me," Kieran replied. "I got the feeling he was working to convince himself more than anyone."

  "Hmm . . . Okay, maybe. . . ."

  "Then let's suppose so. Isn't it possible that inwardly, despite all the rationalizing, subconsciously he couldn't really buy that line. So maybe he decided to take insurance, and at the same time extract dues that he'd earned, and his risk-free alter ego, who walks forth into fame and fortune, hadn't." Kieran contemplated one of the coins as he rolled it edge over edge across the backs of his outstretched fingers and back again, indicating that the case rested. Then he flipped it up and caught it, palmed it onto the back of his other hand, and looked at June questioningly.

  "Heads," she obliged.

  He lifted his hand to reveal nothing.

  "It makes sense," June conceded. "As much as anything, anyway. So where do we go next?"

  Kieran got up from the recliner and crossed ov
er to the liquor cabinet while he considered their options. "Vodka tonic with a slice of lime," he pronounced.

  "Right. How did you know?"

  "I didn't. Power of suggestion at work." Kieran began fixing the drinks, an Irish Bushmills whiskey straight for himself—expensive import; June had probably gotten it in just for him. "The only lead we've got to Sarda-One is through this Elaine. Sarda-Two ought to know everything we need to locate her, but all his recollections of her have been erased somehow. Or . . ." he looked at June pointedly, "they're still in there somewhere but are blocked."

  "So if we knew how his amnesia was engineered, there might be a way to undo it," she said, taking his meaning.

  "And when was it engineered? It couldn't have been before Sarda-One went into the copier, because he'd need to retain enough about what was going on in order to clean out Sarda-Two's bank account. But it couldn't have been after Sarda-Two came out at the other end, because if he came out knowing what was going on, he'd have promptly stopped it. So how was it done?"

  June accepted a glass as Kieran moved over to her. "Some kind of drug, maybe?" she offered, looking up at him.

  "Not selective enough. Too uncontrollable and unpredictable. We're looking for something that would work precisely . . . surgically." He took an approving sip of his Irish, swilling it around in his mouth before swallowing, then sat down on the other end of the couch.

  June thought again. "Then how about something almost surgical? Could they have manipulated the regeneration of the neural circuitry so that selected memory configurations were eliminated?"

  "That sounds more like it," Kieran agreed. "And a project like TX would include the right know-how if it were possible. . . ." He nodded, warming more to the idea. "Is something like that possible? You know, I'm really not sure."

  June took the twist of lime from the glass and squeezed it over her drink while going back in her mind over the things she had read and heard on the subject. "I'm not either," she confessed finally.

  "Who's the neuro-circuitry expert, then?" Kieran asked. "It doesn't sound like Sarda's specialty."

  "No. It would be Tom Norgent. Memory extraction and implanting was his department."

  "And you've gotten to know him in your work at Quantonix?"

  "Sure . . . kind of."

  "Hmm . . ." Kieran drummed on the rim of his glass with his fingertips, glanced at the clock displayed in part of the mural, and looked at June. "If Sarda-One is collecting already, there might not be a lot of time before he vanishes. The only other lead we have is this Trevany character. If I have a try at tracking him down, can you get back to the firm this afternoon and talk to Norgent? If news and publicity is your department, it shouldn't be hard to find a line."

  "Okay." One of June's attractions was her easy way of agreeing, without the compulsion so many people seemed to have for finding complications with anything anyone else proposed. She finished her drink and left within minutes.

  Kieran used his handset to call the Oasis, where Trevany had said he was staying. The name was registered, sure enough, but there was no reply from the room. Kieran tried the General Net Personal Code Directory and obtained numbers for a flotilla of Trevanys. A minute or two later he was talking to one who was listed as currently on Mars and in Lowell City.

  "Hello. Is this the Walter Trevany who's booked in at the Oasis hotel?"

  "Yes, it is. Who might this be?"

  "The name's Kieran Thane. We've met in a kind of way, but it won't mean anything to you."

  "Oh?"

  "Yesterday, you recognized Leo Sarda in the Oasis restaurant. He was with a couple of people. I was one of them."

  "Oh, that. Yes . . . Is that his name? I only knew him as Leo. What was going on there? I hadn't made any mistake."

  "I know. He's been having some problems lately. That was what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Trevany. You might be able to help us."

  "Are you a doctor or something?"

  "You could say that." Which was true. Trevany just had. "I was wondering if we could get together, whenever would be convenient."

  "Well . . . I'm kinda busy for the next few days. Then we'll be heading out on a field expedition."

  "Oh, yes—you said you're a geologist."

  "I'm not sure when I could be available. There's always a mess of last-minute things that hit you when you're organizing something like this. I won't be coming back to Lowell tonight."

  "Where are you at the moment?" Kieran asked.

  "At a place called Stony Flats. It's about twenty miles north of the main canyon—one of the early bases. We're fitting out a mobile lab to go to a base camp that we've got up in the Tharsis region."

  "Maybe I could come out there instead."

  "You're sure?"

  "Why not? I'm the one with the questions."

  "You'd need to drive. Are you mobile?"

  "That's something I was planning on taking care of anyway," Kieran said. He thought rapidly. There was enough time to find himself a vehicle and get out there. "How about if I make it late this afternoon?" he suggested.

  "That sounds good. I'll give you directions on how to get here. . . ."

  Kieran finished the call and put the comset back in his jacket pocket. "Come on," he said to Guinness. "It's time we stopped by and paid our respects to Brother Mahom."

  9

  June picked her way through to Tom Norgent's paper-strewn desk and work terminal, located amid the clutter of electrical racking, pipe mazes, and other equipment surrounding the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab. A few other people were working in the vicinity, but the frenzy of activity that had characterized the previous couple of days had largely abated.

  Tom was in his sixties, with a grizzled beard, button-nosed, Mars-tanned face, and a balding scalp merging with his forehead to leave an atoll reef of whitish hair fringing the back and sides. He greeted her in shirt sleeves and loose khaki pants, pulling a folding chair out from a gap by a table with charts and manuals on top, and having to clear some boxes and a piece of instrumentation out of the way to make room.

  June had dealt with him intermittently through her time with the project, finding him genial enough, if a bit inclined toward fussiness—Santa Claus out of uniform, fresh from a beard trim. During the ride back into Quantonix, the thought had crossed her mind that Elaine might not have been the only person involved in this, and if Sarda's partial amnesia had indeed been brought about by neural manipulation, it would have needed precisely the kind of inside expertise that Norgent possessed. All the same, although she had learned to be wary of external impressions, she found it all but impossible to picture him in the role of accessory to dire conspiracy and intrigue.

  "I was wondering when it would be my turn to get the treatment," he said after he had sat down and cleared space on the desk for his elbows. "Leo says you've been squeezing everyone else's brains like lemons. . . . Do you know where Leo is, by the way? Max said he went rushing off this morning with some kind of personal problem, and we haven't seen him since."

  June shook her head. "I've just got back in."

  "Where's that friend you had here the other day—Kieran, was it?"

  "Oh, out on business. He's thinking of getting a place here. He moves around a lot—has places everywhere."

  June produced a paper pad from the folder she had set by the chair, and a pen from an inside pocket. Tom seemed surprised. "What? Aren't I going to be taped or something?"

  "Some things, I like to do the old-fashioned way." That seemed to put him more at ease, and he settled more comfortably. June went on, "I've never really had a chance to get into the neural dynamics: transferring the activity pattern that defines a personality from one neural system to another. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to finding out more about it."

  "Ah, yes." Tom was obviously on home ground. "That was the other big breakthrough that made TX possible, along with data-mining the DNA. I take it Leo's been through all that with you?"
r />   "Pretty much."

  "But of course, DNA can't supply the brain modifications acquired after conception—every experience from the beginning of growth can alter how neurons connect up and communicate. Indeed, they have to. That's what makes us who we are."

  June nodded. "Right. I follow that."

  Tom unclasped his hands to show a palm. "But it turns out that a mathematical map of the neural connection pattern is sufficient. It contains all the information you need to regenerate the personality. That means you can infer what you need from the wave functions without having to specify detail at the molecular level. That makes the problem tractable."

  "In the same kind of way that the expanded DNA information lets you interpolate most of the physical structure."

  "Well . . . yes, pretty close."

  "Okay, that's from one brain to another. But how about the other possibility that people have been bandying about for years: uploading a mind into a totally different kind of system—holotronic or something? Do the TX processes get you any nearer to something like that?"

  Tom wrinkled his nose. "In principle I guess it could work. But to upload it into another kind of system . . . ? I don't know of anything other than a biological nervous system that could be complex enough to express the code, and at the same time be sufficiently modifiable in the way it would have to. Right now, that would be a tough one."

  June detected no hint of the wariness that she would have expected in somebody skirting a potentially dangerous topic. She edged closer to the subject that she had come here to learn about. "How about transferring parts of someone's psyche, then, Tom? You know, maybe some special skill or knowledge that they have? You see it in movies, where something that a person has learned is extracted and written into a machine or whatever."

  This time Tom shook his head. "It makes good stories, sure. But our knowledge of memory mapping simply isn't up to it at this point in the game. We don't have any way of telling what parts of the total pattern correspond to any particular skill or piece of knowledge, like what you're talking about."